composer / theorist

news blog

The Lexical Tones Podcast, hosted by Robert McClure, offers a weekly conversation with a guest composer, performer, and/or artist creating new works of contemporary art/music. Each creative supplies three adjectives about their work or themselves, and Rob tries to discover additional connections through discussion and listening examples (several complete compositions). These conversations often focus on aesthetics, technique, process, meaning, perception, and the musical origins of the featured guest.

St. Francis College Professor of Fine Arts and flutist Roberta Michel performed with accompaniment by pianists Mirna Lekiƈ and Andrea Lodge my new piece for flute(s) and piano: Sound Imagert No.6 at the Concert at Half Past Twelve, The Flute Through the Ages, II on Monday, October 23 in the College's Founders Hall.

Happy to announce that I will be presenting my current research at Society for Music Theory's national meeting (SMT 2017), to be held in Virginia from November 2nd to the 5th. I will be presenting along with my fellow coauthor Nicholas Nelson. The title of the paper is "Near-Symmetry: A Theory of Chord Quality with Implications for Voice Leading".

I am very happy to announce that Nova Chamber Music Series has commissioned me a chamber piano concerto for their 40th anniversary season to take place in the Spring of 2018. Exact date TBA!

NOVA’s current Artistic Director, Utah Symphony Pianist Jason Hardink (who will be performing my piece) was appointed in the fall of 2009. Under his leadership the series has deepened relationships with Utah composers while broadening NOVA’s profile nationally through commissions and recordings of works by composers Curtis Curtis-Smith, Jason Eckardt, and Michael Ellison. Since 2009 NOVA has featured collaborations with Utah Symphony Music Director Thierry Fischer, soprano Celena Shafer, and the PLAN-B Theatre Company.

Cambridge Scholars recently published Form and Process in Music (An Analytic Sampler), a book in which I contributed a chapter, and helped edit. Basic information below. And HERE, the website if you want to purchase it.

Form and Process in Music, 1300–2014: An Analytic Sampler draws together papers delivered at the 2014 meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis. The conference spanned an unusually wide spectrum of musical styles, including papers on European twelve-tone music after the Second World War, fourteenth-century music, pop music and jazz, the music of living composers, narrative and characterization, and the history of music theory. The title of the book reflects the large span of musical cultures that are represented within, but also accounts for the common thread through all of these essays, a strong emphasis on understanding the forms and processes of music through analysis. The reader will find within it a compendium of analytic techniques for numerous musical styles.